Submit Sitemap to MSN, Google and Yahoo

In November 2006, Google, Yahoo! and MSN joined forces to support a new industry standard for sitemaps: Sitemaps 0.90 (see MSN announcement here). As long as webmasters follow the protocol, they can ensure their sites are fully and consistently indexed across all the major search engines (a real step forward). This article is important for all those with missing or poorly ranked pages.

The official site for the joint venture is at http://www.sitemaps.org/ and contains a lot of info about the new standard and it's syntax. What the site singularly fails to do is explain correctly how to submit your sitemap to the big three! The format suggested on the site of:

http://search-engine-url/ping?sitemap=your sitemap_url

does not currently work at any of the three sites! Until it does, We provide instructions for how to (a) create your sitemap and (b) how to submit to each of the three search engines...

Creating your Sitemap

Some hosting providers(for example 1and1) provide utilities via their web control panel, to create your sitemap, so you should always check with your provider first. If this service is not available, then make a visit to http://www.sitemapspal.com/ and enter your site URL into the generator box. Copy-and-paste the resulting sitemap into notepad, then save-and-upload to your site with the file name: sitemap.xml

If you want to validate the XML prior to uploading to the search engines (useful if you have made any manual amendments), pay a visit to the SmartIT XML Sitemap validator where you can put in the URL of your sitemap and check it against the standard.

Submit sitemap to MSN

MSN have yet to implement a formal interface for Sitemap submission (as at April 2007). To monitor the situation, please visit (from time to time) the following pages:

MSN Site Owner Help
Livesearch official blog (where future announcements are likely to be found)

Whilst MSN have yet to implement a front door, there is a recognised back door for submitting your sitemap to the MSN Search index; namely moreover.com! You should use the following syntax directly in your browser URL box:

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://yourdomain.com/yoursitemap.xml

For example, to submit the sitemap for this site, the correct entry in the browser is as follows:

http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.seo-expert-services.co.uk/rss.xml

Since February 2005, moreover.com have been the official provider of RSS feeds to the myMSN portal (see press release) and reliable evidence suggests that submission to moreover.com will result in MSN spidering your pages within 2-3 weeks.

Update 18/07/07: MSN still do not support direct submission but now suggest on their blog that you add a reference to your Sitemap into your robots.txt file (something now supported by sitemaps.org). For example:

User-agent: *
Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml
Disallow: /cgi-bin/

This would tell MSN (and all other engines) to crawl your sitemap file but not to crawl your cgi-bin directory. For more info on how to implement a robots.txt file (in the root of your site webserver) please visit: http://www.robotstxt.org/

Submit sitemap to Google

Google originally developed the XML schema for sitemaps and have developed a dedicated portal for webmasters, from where you can submit your sitemap:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/

First, you need to tell Google all the sites you own, then verfiy that you indeed own them. The verifiaction is achieved by adding a metatag between the head tags on your site homepage. The syntax for the tag is as follows:

<meta content="unique code advised by google" name="verify-v1">

There are full instructions on how to do this on the Google site.

Submit sitemap to Yahoo

Yahoo follows a similar approach to Google. Again, there is a dedicated sevice for webmasters (Yahoo! Site Explorer) and a procedure for verifying your ownsership of the site. First go to:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/

Add a site, then click on the verification button. You can then download a verfication key html file - which you will need to upload to the root directory of your webserver. Then you can return to Site Explorer and tell Yahoo to start authentication. This will take up to 24 hours. At the same time you can also add your sitemap by clicking on the manage button and then adding the sitemap as a feed.

Submit sitemap to Ask

Ask follows a simpler approach to the other three. To submit you sitemap, you simply enter a ping URL, followed by the full URL of where your sitemap is located:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

After clicking return, you will get a reassuring message from Ask that they have received your submission. Very neat!

Some Web Design Mistakes and Golden Rules

1. Keep Everything Obvious

Visitors to a website expect certain conventions, breaking these is a great way of losing visitors. People expect to find the navigation at the top of a page or on the left hand side. Logos are mostly found on the top left. Much research has been conducted into how people view and use web pages. The good news is that you do not to know all of this; instead look at how larger companies such as eBay, Amazon, Google, Microsoft structure their pages and the language they use, then emulate them.

2. Limit Colours

A website using too many colours at a time can be overwhelming to many users and can make a website look cheap and tacky. Any users with colour blindness or contrast perception difficulties may even be unable to use the site.

Limiting a palette to 2 or 3 colours will nearly always lead to a slicker looking design and has the added bonus of simplifying your design choices, reducing design time.

Software like Color Wheel Pro can greatly simplify the creation of a pallet by showing which colours sit well together. If you really do not have the eye for design then software like this provides the perfect way of escaping monotone or badly combined colour schemes.

If your site uses blue and yellow together or red and green then it may present problems to anyone suffering with colour blindness. Vischeck.com provide free software that can simulate different types of colour blindness.

3. Be Careful With Fonts

The set of fonts available to all visitors of a website is relatively limited. Add to that the possibility of a user having a visual impairment then the options become even smaller. It is advisable to stick to fonts such as Arial, Verdana, Courier, Times, Geneva and Georgia. They may not be very interesting but your content should be more interesting than your font and if it can't be read, what is the point of having a site?

Black text on a white background is far easier for the majority of people to read than white text on a black background. If you have large amounts of text then a white or pale background is far more user friendly. Always ensure that there is a good contrast between any text and its background. Blue text on a blue background is okay as long as the difference in shade is significant.

Verdana is often cited as being the easiest to read on the screen. Georgia is probably the best option for a serif font.

4. Plan for Change

If you fix the height of your page to 600 pixels will you still be able to add additional menu items without completely redesigning your page?

The ability to add or remove content from a website is fundamental to the ongoing success of it. Having to rewrite the entire web page or website each time you want to make a small change is sure fire way to kill your interest in your own site and will negatively impact your overall design and usability.

Getting a good idea of how your website is likely to grow will clarify how best to structure your layout. For example, a horizontal navigation is often more restrictive than a side navigation unless you use drop down menus; if your navigation is likely to grow and you hate drop down menus then your design choice has been 99% made for you!

Understanding how to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), avoiding unconventional layouts and complicated backgrounds will all help enormously.

5. Be Consistent

Again, don't make your visitors think! About how to use your site at least. If your navigation is at the top on your homepage, it should be at the top on all other pages too. If your links are coloured red ensure the the same convention is used on all sections.

By using CSS correctly you can make most of this happen automatically leaving you free to concentrate on the content.

6. Keep it Relevant

A picture is better than a thousand words but if the picture you took on holiday is not relevant to your Used Car Sales website then you should really replace it with something which reflects the content or mood of the page; a photo of a car perhaps!

If you can take something off of your web page without it adversely affecting the message, appearance or legality of your website you should do it without hesitation.

Avoid the need to add images, Flash animations or adverts just because you have space. This wastes bandwidth and obscures the intentions of your website. If you absolutely must fill the space, then exercise your imagination to find something as relevant as possible.

Keeping your content focused will ultimately help your search-engine rankings.

7. Become a CSS Expert

Cascading Style Sheets should be any web designer's best friend. CSS makes it is possible to separate the appearance and layout of your page from the content. This has huge benefits when it comes to updating and maintaining your site, making your site accessible and making your site easy for search engines to read.

8. Avoid Complexity

Using standard layouts for your web page will save you development time and make your site easier to use. Pushing the boundaries nearly always leads to quirky behaviour, cross-browser problems, confused site visitors and maintenance headaches. Unless you really do like a challenge then avoid complexity wherever possible.

Mostly used tricks of Dirty Linking

As we all are familiar with the concept of search engine positions. The best way to achieve Search Engine Positions are acquiring links from external web pages. These links can come from websites who like your site or who link to your site(natural links), reciprocal link building, directory submissions and lots of other ways.

True quality links will carry benefits far beyond that of attaining a coveted position in the search engine results. The links will bring traffic from the Web page linking to your Web page. Therefore, you want to ensure you trade or barter links from quality partners.

Sometimes it's hard to determine who is a quality linking partner, even for the expert. So, how can you tell if your link is on a Web page where its value will not be very good?

The short list below highlights ways of diminishing or nullifying the value of a link to your site from another Web page.

Meta Tag Masking - this old trick simply used CGI codes to hide the Meta tags from browsers while allowing search engines to actually see the Meta tags.

Robots Meta Instructions - using noindex and nofollow attributes let's the novice link partner see the visible page with their link while telling the search engines to ignore the page and the links found on the page. Nofollow can be used while allowing the page to be indexed which gives the impression that the search engines will eventually count the link.

Rel=nofollow Attributes - this is not a real attribute based upon HTML standards, but rather it is an attribute approved by the search engines to help identify which links should not be followed. This attribute is often used with blogs to prevent comment and link spam. The link will appear on the Web page and in the search engine's cache, but never be counted.

Dynamic Listing - dynamic listing is a result of having links appear randomly across a series of pages. Each time the link is found on a new page, the search engines count consider the freshness of the link. It is extremely possible that the link won't be on the same page upon the next search engine visitation. So, the link from a partner displaying rotating, dynamic link listings rarely helps.

Floating List - this can be easily missed when checking link partners. Essentially, your link could be number one today, but as new link partners are added your link is moved down the list. This is harmful because the values of the links near the bottom of the list are considered to be of lesser value than the links at the top. With the floating list, it is possible to have your link moved to a new page whose PR value is significantly less or not existent and the new page may not be visited and indexed for months.

Old Cache - the caching date provided by Google indicates the last time the page was cached. Pages with lower PR values tend to be visited and cached less often than pages that have medium to high PR values. If the cache is more than six months old, it can be surmised that Google has little or no desire to revisit the page.

Denver Pages - while Denver, CO is a nice place to visit, Denver Pages are not a place you want to find your link in a trade. Denver Pages typically have a large amount of links grouped into categories on the same page. Some people call this the mile high list. These types of pages do not have any true value in the search engines and are not topically matched to your site.

Muddy Water Pages - these are dangerous and easy to spot. Your link will be piled in with non-topically matched links with no sense of order. It's like someone took all the links and thrown them in the air to see where they land. These are worse than the Denver Pages.

Cloaking - cloaking is the process of providing a page to people while providing a different page to search engines. You could be seeing your link on the Web page, but the search engines could possibly never see the link because they are provided with a different copy. Checking Google's cache is the only way to catch this ploy.

Dancing Robots - this can be easily performed with server-side scripting like PHP and is rarely easy to catch. In this situation people that attempt to view the robots.txt file receive a copy of the robots.txt file that does not include exclusion instructions for the search engines. However, when the search engines request the robots.txt file they receive the exclusion instructions. With this situation the links pages will never be linked and you'll never know why without expert assistance.

Meta Tags and Robots.txt Confusion - which instructions have the most weight? Don't know the answer? Shame. Search engines do. If they conflict the page Meta tags are typically considered the rule to follow.

Link the Head - while these links do not count in the search engines and do not show up on the Web page, they do get counted by scripts or programs designed to verify the links exist. These programs only look for the URL within the source codes for the Web page.

Empty Anchors - this is a nasty trick, but can be an honest mistake. The links exist and are counted by the search engines, but unfortunately are neither visible nor clickable on the Web page. So, there are no traffic values from the link.

Google celebrates 9th Birthday!!!

Happy 9th Birthday Google!

How to Avoid Alienating the Major Search Engines

Each of the major search engines Google, Yahoo and MSN have quality webmaster guidelines in place to prevent the unfair manipulation of search engine rankings by unscrupulous website owners. These webmaster guidelines change frequently to ‘weed’ out any new deceptive practices and those websites found engaging in these illicit practices are consequently dropped from the search engine rankings of the major search engine they have offended.

Being banned or dropped from the search engine rankings can have dire effects on your website traffic, online sales generation and site popularity. Especially if your website is classified as a ‘bad neighborhood’ site, you can then kiss your reciprocal linking campaign goodbye, as existing and prospective link partners will not want to be associated with your site for fear of their own rankings dropping.

If you wish to avoid alienating the major search engines then do not engage in the following SE tactics:

1. ‘Cloaking’ or sneaky redirects - displaying different content to the search engines than shown to your normal website visitors including hidden text and hidden links. Often this is achieved by delivering content based on the IP address of the user requesting the page, when a user is identified as a search engine spider a side-server script delivers a different version of the web page to deceive the search engine into giving the website a higher ranking.

2. ‘Doorway’ pages created specifically for the search engines that are aimed at spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for specific keyword phrases to send the search engine spider to a different page. With doorway pages a user doesn’t arrive at the page they were looking for. Similarly avoid ‘cookie cutter’ approaches that direct users to affiliate advertising with little or no original content.

3. Don’t create pages that install viruses, Trojans or badware. ‘Badware’ is spyware, malware or deceptive adware that tracks a user’s movements on the internet and reports this information back to unscrupulous marketing groups who then bombard the user with targeted advertising. This type of spyware is often unknowingly downloaded when playing online games or is attached to software or information downloads from a site. They are often difficult to identify and remove from a user’s PC and can affect the PC’s functionality.

4. Avoid using software that sends automatic programming queries to the search engines to submit pages or check rankings. This type of software consumes valuable computing resources of the search engines and you will be penalized for using it.

5. Don’t load web pages with irrelevant words.

6. Don’t link to ‘bad neighborhood’ sites who have:

* Free for all links pages
* Link farms - automated linking schemes with lots of unrelated links
* Known web spammers or the site has been dropped or banned by the search engines.

7. Avoid ‘broken links’ or ‘404 errors’, your site will be penalized for them.

8. Don’t display pages with minimal content that is of little value to your site visitors.

9. Do not duplicate content unnecessarily.

10. Do not use pop-ups, pop-unders or exit consoles.

11. Do not use pages that rely significantly on links to content created for another website.

12. Do not use ‘cross linking’ to artificially inflate a site’s popularity. For example, the owner of multiple sites cross linking all of his sites together, if all sites are hosted on the same servers the search engines will pick this up and the sites will be penalized.

13. Do not misuse a competitors name or brand names in site content.

14. Sites with numerous, unnecessary virtual host names will be penalized.

15. Do not use techniques that artificially increase the number of links to your web pages ie. Link farms.

16. Display web pages with deceptive, fraudulent content or pages that provide users with irrelevant page content.

17. Using content, domain titles, meta tags and descriptions that violate any laws, regulations, infringe on copyrights & trademarks, trade secrets or intellectual property rights of an individual or entity. Specifically in terms of publicity, privacy, product design, torts, breach of contract, injury, damage, consumer fraud, false, misleading, slanderous or threatening content.

Google Slips in China

A new report shows Baidu.com Inc. increased its share of the search market in China's top cities, while rival Google Inc. lost ground despite continued heavy investments in its Chinese operations.

Baidu has a 69.5 percent share of the search market in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, up 7.6 percentage points since last year, according to a report (in Chinese) by Peter Lu, managing partner and chief analyst at China IntelliConsulting Corp. (CIC).

Meanwhile, Google saw its share of the market shrink, falling 1.1 percentage points to 23 percent.

Google's decline was offset somewhat by improved performance among students during the most recent six months. But the company continued to lose its older, more affluent users to Baidu, the report said.

These figures are likely to step up the pressure on Google China President Kai-Fu Lee to deliver results for the company. Google China has grown quickly, hiring hundreds of staff and moving into a new building close to the campus of Beijing's prestigious Tsinghua University. But these investments have yet to deliver the hoped-for domination of China's search market and raised concerns the company expanded too fast in the country.

Those concerns came to a head in April, when Google admitted that a software tool released by its Chinese operations used a database developed by rival Sohu.com Inc. for a competing product -- a stunning admission for a company that is widely respected for the strength of its engineering operations and the caliber of its software developers.

The CIC report had some good news for Google. The company's efforts to strengthen its Chinese search capabilities are recognized by users, with 58.5 percent of respondents in a survey saying they'd noticed changes to the search engine. Of those respondents, 65.3 percent said Google's Chinese search engine had improved.

Other search engines also saw their share of the search market decline. Yahoo China, which is run by Alibaba.com Inc., saw its share drop 2.9 percentage points to 2.3 percent of the market, while Sohu.com's Sogou search engine fell 1.4 points to 1.8 percent.

Way of Link Campaigns

If we are going to be engaged with link campaigns,there are various reasons for that. Mostly search engines always prefer links to determine a site rank in SERPs(search engine results page).And if we talk about Google algorithms, link campaigns always play a vital role in search engine promotion and marketing strategies.

Before getting into it deeply,lets have a look on types of link campaigns we often handle:

Reciprocal Link: This is where two sites exchange links to each other's site.

One Way Link : where one site links to other site without getting link back from that site.

Tri-Way Link : where one site links to other site and get back a link from other's secondary site.

Reciprocal linking is a easy process than one way linking and also time consuming process too. During this process, a web master look for the related websites and ask them for link exchange.

If and when you receive some responses, you should add their sites as soon as you can, and send them an email telling them that their link has been added, and include the url where they can see their site.

In-Bound (One-way) Links are the best type of links if you can get them. It's not all that difficult to do so, but as in anything worth while, there will be an amount of effort involved.

The easiest way to get In bound links to your site is to do directory submissions. There are many great free directories to submit to, and it's worth the time and effort to get listed in as many as you possibly can.

There are also fee-based directories which you submit to, and as your budget allows, you should try to get listed in all directories that are relevant to your site's topic.

The next way to get one-way links to your site is to do a press release. With sites such as prwire, you can submit a press release to them for free, and that will not only get your site exposure, but it will also get you some in-bound links.

If you have the ability to compose articles or columns, there are many sites that can get your site exposure by you allowing them to re-print your content. While some may argue that this procedure may penalize you in the search engines for duplicate content, as long as you have posted your article to your site first, you shouldn't get hit by a duplicate content penalty.